George Veith’s six hundred page Black April, an account of the fall of South Vietnam in 1975 is a must-read for anyone interested in that conflict. The end game of a war illuminates its strategic assumptions like nothing else, for there at the last the assumptions made by both sides are taken to their logical conclusions and their implications are magnified to the ultimate degree.

The Fall of Vietnam, readers may be interested to learn, was a surprise to both parties. It was a surprise to those on both sides, who thought the South would collapse immediately after the American withdrawal. It survived with such tenacity even after Congress effectively left it without enough ammunition to defend itself that the North Vietnamese actually debated whether to wait 3 or so years before restarting the offensive. But when the Fall actually started it came with a speed that shocked even Giap.

The Politburo had decided, even while it was signing the Paris Peace accords, that it would violate them. The question was when. That Giap was the architect of the ultimate effort there was no doubt. Stung by the defeat of the 1968 and 1972 offensives, his plan for a renewed attack was met with some skepticism. But he returned from what appeared to be a semi-exile in Russia to create a secret planning group, the Central Cell, which drew up the plan for the 1975 offensive.

It was, readers may again be surprised to learn, on somewhat a more modest scale than the failed 1972 effort. North Vietnam too was on its last legs. It was at the point of conscripting child soldiers into its units. This was to be the last throw for both sides.

Giap’s basic idea was simple. He would take advantage of the new extension of the Ho Chi Minh trail, really a highway by then, and th fuel pipeline which ran its length to overwhelm the ARVN. In reality, the Vietnam War was fought with the allied lines facing West along an 800 mile front, with the PAVN holding the border and South Vietnamese territory along it. The PAVN objective was to whipsaw the ARVN around, and when they were unbalanced, to drive to the coast. Then having done that, they would essentially defeat the Republic of South Vietnam in detail.

With the new trail, Giap had the ability to switch axes of attack and ripple his thrusts along this long front. Saigon’s commanders unintentionally made this easier by making it hard to switch reserves between I, II and III corps without Thieu’s permission — a rigidity that was to have tragic consequences.

There hovered over the battlefield the specter of the “enclave strategy” — a concept that had been kicking around for some years — which held that the only hope for South Vietnamese survival lay in shortening their lines to exclude the now-indefensible I Corps area [fixed] and concentrate South Vietnam’s remaining reserves in the South. The North Vietnamese feared this and the new logistical poverty of the South cried out for it.

But the proximate roots of the South Vietnamese defeat in 1975 lay in Thieu’s determination to hold on to I Corps as long as he could, and when he could no longer, to precipitately embrace the enclave idea by ordering a retreat South — a withdrawal under assault by armor, artillery and masses of troops that could not be effected. That belated embrace of the enclave idea, implemented in mid-crisis, turned into a rout. Masses of terrified civilians, often the relatives of the South Vietnamese soldiers themselves, swelled the retreat and ultimately culminated in the Fall of Saigon.

Yet none of this obscures the fact which Veith highlights. It was Vietnam’s war too, not the conflict between American imperialism and the noble Vietnamese that the anti-war crowd portrayed. The Vietnam war was at its heart a civil war between millions of Indochinese people who choose Communism on the one hand and millions of people who rejected it on the other.

Their story was largely untold by a press intent on portraying the South Vietnamese as lackeys and misrepresenting the war in such a way that even today, decades after the conflict ended, it remains probably the most mis-remembered conflict in recent times. There are untold numbers who can tell you with amazing accuracy, how the different battles of the Second World War was fought and yet who have no idea of the titanic battles between the Vietnamese.

In the main it was fought, as Veith shows, pretty much like a conventional war: with armor, artillery, infantry attacks and aerial strikes. The PAVN had T-54s, APCs, manpads, air defense regiments, artillery batteries, signals intelligence, deception plans — the whole works. It was nothing like the Black Pajama versus imperialist lackey narrative that much of the press pushed.

Those unfamiliar with the events of 1975 will be surprised, scandalized even, by the sheer tenacity and creativity of the South Vietnamese Army in its death agonies against this massive force. The PAVN routinely shelled the retreats, including the civilians, killing thousands of noncombatants and at one point the South Vietnamese Air Force thought of something to hold up the North Vietnamese.

During the retreat from Xuan Loc, ARVN radio direction-finding teams located the 341st Division Forward Headquarters from the heavy communication traffic as the unit frantically tried to catch the retreating South Vietnamese. The VNAF decided to strike using a deadly weapon, the CBU-55, a fuel/air cluster bomb designed originally to clear minefields. As described by CIA analyst Frank Snepp, “With the help of DAO technicians, South Vietnamese pilots rigged up a special bomb rack for . . . the terrifying killing device known as the CBU-55. . . . A C-130 transport with a CBU on board took off from Tan Son Nhut, circled once over Xuan Loc to the east, and dropped its load virtually on top of the command post of the 341st Division just outside the newly-captured town. The casualties were tremendous. Over 250 PAVN troops were incinerated or died from suffocation in the post-explosion vacuum.”

Once the Communists determined the nature of the attack, they loudly accused Saigon of “flouting all norms of morality” and denounced the officials who ordered the use of the weapon as “war criminals.”

Not only did they improvise a MOAB attack, the South Vietnamese airforce actually scraped together an improvised ARCLIGHT consisting of 40 A-37s attacking a target by night using beacons to guide their release. But in the end, it was futile.

Once the South Vietnamese had broken, the North virtually emptied its barracks of every soldier that it had and sent them south for the climactic battle for Saigon. It was in some sense an imitation, perhaps a conscious imitation, of Stalin’s climactic battle for Berlin. The scale was staggering.

To accomplish this strategy, the People’s Army at the gates of Saigon had a force of five corps comprising fourteen divisions and another ten independent regiments and brigades—not counting the various B-2 Front sapper units. In addition, there were another two divisions operating nearby. While the RVNAF could barely muster 110,000 troops to defend Saigon, according to PAVN figures, “our entire combat forces totaled 270,000 troops (250,000 main force troops and 20,000 local force troops) and 180,000 strategic and campaign-level rear services troops.”

If that is true, then together with other forces in-country during the Saigon attack, PAVN had more troops in South Vietnam—something close to 550,000—than the Americans did at the height of the U.S. commitment, around 543,000.

I could not help but think as I read these words, what would have happened if an allied amphibious force had landed north of that PAVN force. But that would be alternative history; and in the real history South Vietnam fell. But it is history which George Veith is determined that we shall not forget, if ever we had learned it in the first place.

Concerning the ARVN’s use of the CBU bomb: at first the PAVN command thought that they had been hit by a tactical nuke and, terribly alarmed, considered halting the offensive lest more nukes be used against them.

A landing by U.S. forces north of the PAVN maneuver mass was not needed. Likely, a resumption of the bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong plus tactical air strikes on PAVN troop concentrations an LOC would have caused the North Viet leadership to cease operations.

Somewhere I read a Peggy Noonan column recounting a party she attended with all of the D.C, movers and shakers present . past and future. She listened in on a conversation between some anti-war matrons bemoaning the revalations of the evil works of the N. Vietnamese communists. She interjected;
” They were tyrants that should have been defeated.”
“Well, we know that now.”, one of the matrons said in exasperation.
Noonan replied;
“But there were people who knew it then!”

Baseball players have their errors marked down and that record follows them till they die, then it stays in the books long after they have gone to Iowas cornfields.
Why do we not record the errors of the Government classes and consult the records each time they come up with a brilliant new scheme?

“The Vietnam war was at its heart a civil war between millions of Indochinese people who choose Communism on the one hand and millions of people who rejected it on the other.”

Yes we had an election based on the same thing. If Giap could have borrowed trillions of dollars from the Chinese he could have merely bought the South as the Democrats bought off the low-information/low-IQ electorate, many of whom were imported from the world’s slums from south of the border and south of the equator. But the cheap solution was to kill everyone in his path.

In his book, A Bright Shining Lie, Neil Sheehan makes much of the idea that the ARVN was (at least initially) used as a presidential palace guard instead of as an offensive element against the PAVN. He seems to think that this was the reason the South lost the war. I don’t think this analysis takes into account the good work General Creighton Abrams did to change things around post Westmoreland. I think this war was winnable, indeed WAS won. And then Congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

The disgrace for abandoning South Vietnam belongs squarely on the Democrats’ shoulders. It was the Democratic Congress, both houses, that voted to defund S. Vietnam. The mendacity and cowardice of this party has been rampant since before McGovern got trounced. The Democrats took revenge for that humiliation not only on S. Vietnam, but on America itself for having rejected the new direction the party had chosen to go. It was the beginning of the end for me as a Democrat. I no longer wished to belong to a feminized bunch of weasels. They’ve been “leading” with their behinds ever since.

During the war, payoffs permitted the PAVN to shunt food and ammo through Kampong Saom like it was Haiphong. America played it like Lt. Col Klink — with Sgt Schultz on watch.

Hanoi further claims, now, that the Ho Chi Min Trail was — despite its expense, blood and toil — more ruse than anything. All serious tonnage was coming in via their Cambodian connection. The trail was absolutely necessary to divert American efforts away from what was really working.

Since their primary logistical needs were for food and small arms, it proved no problem to hustle them through Cambodian sources. The Cambodians were so poor that it didn’t take much grease to lubricate the trade. And, of course, Hanoi had ‘assets’ near the top of the Cambodian power structure. Their anti-colonial mentality was so complete that it was never any trouble to recruit ‘talent.’

Since these claims are as likely to be true as to be propaganda… They need to be cross-checked.

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The other, embarrassing, revelations are just how many tunnels the VC had shoveled under the South. There were/are so many it makes the US Army look like 500,000 Schultzes.

There were/are tunnels that ran right up to our base perimeter wire.

I guess the locals WERE watching Hogan’s Heros. (!) The only thing missing was the tree stump portal.

At the Academy Awards, held during the collapse of South Vietnam, one presenter smugly announced that “Occupied Vietnam is now in the process of being liberated.” I seem to recall that he was roundly booed for it, but I’m not certain that I remember correctly.

We had all the B-52s. We had the treaty and the responsibility and the means and the need. It would have been so easy. So much was at stake. So many have died since, not just in Vietnam but around the world. If Pres. Ford had ordered the Air Force to execute the PAVN would have been sitting ducks. They were driving down the highways with their lights on. We would have killed tens of thousands of them in a couple of hours and destroyed their regime.

The Berlin Wall might have come down ten years earlier. The Ayatollah would have remained a crank in exile. Ford could have dared Congress to impeach him and arrested a few traitors. Carter would have retired to a deserved obscurity on his peanut farm. Obama would have remained a third tier political grifter or third rate faculty lounge layabout.

So much was at stake and we threw it all away. The costs were not and never are just the sunk costs but the opportunity costs.

One might imagine that Hanoi has been crediting one man to hide the operations of many others.

Further, it must cause ex-patriot Vietnamese, living in America, absolute paranoia as to whom one can trust.

IIRC, Philby had Central’s support to redirect suspicions away from himself, all during his perfidies.

The West never doped him out until the extreme end.

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Sirius @7

Sheehan was unaware of the concept of a strategic reserve.

For his information: the parachute force was Saigon’s ‘imperial guard/ 82nd Airborne.’

He couldn’t understand why it wasn’t choppering in, right and left, so that Americans could go home.

The fact is that such capital city guard formations exist in every society at all times — and never more so than in wartime.

Lincoln had the better part of an army garrisoning Washington, D.C. during our Civil War. Indeed, building it up was his first priority when he was sworn in. There are numerous accounts of Union formations being heckled as they marched through (the slave counties of) Maryland. Such tactless effronteries stopped soon, thereafter.

The VC kept the parachute corps pinned down by their very existence. While they were trained for mobile warfare, they were, in fact, required to stand watch — like the Old 3rd Regiment. Going nowhere was their job.

As for the rest of ARVN: it was perpetually in the fight. Such military matters are over the head of Sheehan.

There were rumors of the NVA (what we called the PAVN at the time) using tanks in early ’68 when I was up at the DMZ. Our news though were rumors, no way to verify aside from first hand reports, even then caution was urged. Artillery, unfortunately, was experienced by all hands within spitting distance of the DMZ; they threw a lot of that miserable stuff at us.

There is nothing quite like enduring an artillery barrage. There really isn’t anything to be done about it aside from waiting it out. Listening to the rounds screaming toward you and you’d always wonder if this would be the last time.

The rumor mill was rampant that the ARVN were sorry troops with the ARVN officers being the absolute worst. The ARVN though, would always fight well at home, where their families were. Move them a few hundred kilometers and you had a different story. Those poor guys never knew what was happening to their families, their wives and their children. The city kids had it much better than the local boys; the cities had police forces, hospitals, food markets, etc. The rural villages had nothing and with the young men gone, the families had no food, no medicine and no protection. It was too much to ask in my opinion.

josh @ 9 – By 1975 the Navy A-6E had reached the fleet. From Wikipedia

The definitive attack version of the Intruder with vastly upgraded navigation and attack systems, introduced in 1970 and first deployed on 9 December 1971. The earlier separate search and track (fire control) radars of the A-6A/B/C were replaced by a single Norden AN/APQ-148 multi-mode radar, and onboard computers with a more sophisticated (and generally more reliable) IC based system, as opposed to the A-6A’s DIANE discrete transistor-based technology. A new AN/ASN-92 inertial navigation system was added, along with the CAINS (Carrier Aircraft Intertial Navigation System), for greater navigation accuracy.

The A-6E did much of the work creating the “Highway of Death” between Kuwait City, Kuwait and Basra, Iraq in 1991. So the capability existed in 1975 for an aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Tonkin to turn the Ho Chi Minh “Highway” into a highway of death way back then. You did not need PGM when you had the full all weather capabilities of the A-6E.

Earlier models of the A-6 had mined Haiphong Harbor and forced the North Vietnamese to the Paris Peace Talks in 1972, so the NVN were quite aware of the capabilities of a much improved model, the A-6E.

4. walter adams “Well, we know that now.”, one of the matrons said in exasperation.

Those NPR-loving matrons are desperate to prove they aren’t “real” communists. They’ll say anything against Red governments to sound moderate or impress their cats.

I’m sorry Vietnam didn’t work out as the West’s demonseed for correct gods, dress, and economic development. (Wait, no I’m not…) But how do we know which stories were made up since the media went haywire? Almost everything bad in the news is written by agents these days, and I think that it started in Vietnam.

I’m sure that this book is a valuable piece of scholarship that among other things, illuminates a very shameful part of American history, the betrayal of the Republic of South Viet Nam.

This review and commentary, published here on the Internet, there is, quite honestly, not much notice (and not to diminish Mr. Fernandez formidable talents as a thinker and writer).

But there is a vast majority of the American people who have not the slightest clue as to what happened in Viet Nam during most of the war, and especially those that were born in the last 30 years.

If such an article were published in the New York Times or Washington Post, quite an outraged uproar would ensue as many cherished beliefs would be disturbed.

I would wager that this book will never be written up in the New York Times Review of Books, because to even notice it would create a problem with so many things that have disappeared down the memory hole, tucked away in a dark place and well forgotten.

And our next Secretary of State will probably be John F. Kerry. Irony and truth are sometimes bitter drinks to swallow for an honest thinker.

I well recall the heartache I had in April 75 And the months of playing interpreter in a refugee camp thereafter, looking for friends who never came.

Long before 1972-73 the insurgency was kaput. Ruff Puffs and White Mice could have kept it from ever coming back. Private firms such as Wal-Mart could have taken over the logistical system, opened the PX to the general public and run it at very affordable cost. Poise and equip ARVN regulars for counterattack (Armor and anti-tank weapons) leave some recon and intel assets in place on the QT, put enough fighter planes in Thailand to keep the North Vietnamese Air Force out of the South——–and one other thing. keep the 1st Cavalry Division there as strategic reaction force.

Do that and the 75 offensive never would have gone anywhere. Well, live and learn.

BTW 3.5 years ago at the airport I met an ARVN officer who had survived 10 years in re-education camps. As we parted company, he wrung my hand and said “Thanks for trying”. OF COURSE, I would try it again.

As much as I can relate to the lose of South Viet Nam to the north, I have some thoughts on the march of history after 1975.

What would the south have become if we had intervened in 75.. I think that it would have become a continuing weight around our feet requiring a large number of troops in a long term effort. Meanwhile the south would have devolved into a military kleptocracy much as is seen in Burma today. It certainly would not have been a strong ally able to contribute to the defense of that area.

The combined government of Viet Nam did the world a service when it destroyed the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. It turned back an effort of China to annex large portions of the country if not out right conquest. Certainly Viet Nam is not a staunch ally of America, however it has some parallel interest that makes it a fellow traveller so to speak in preventing China from total domination of the South China sea and sealing off of the sea lanes through the area. Would that we could have some thing similiar in the Mid East.

Bye the bye before someone jumps om me, I did a year with the 1st Infantry along the Combodian border in 65-66.

Excellent analysis. I agree. Taking the long view of things, it seems to me that Vietnam now provides a strategic counter to China that will grow increasingly important in the years to come. I don’t think that South Vietnam, had it survived, could have fulfilled this role; as you observed, it would have become a corrupt military dictatorship like Burma, and thus a burden and an embarrassment to the U.S. I realize this is a rather ruthless position, but there it is. One point of disagreement: in my opinion the Vietnamese did not turn back the PLA in the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War (or Third Indochina War); rather, the PLA withdrew from Vietnam on its own volition after thoroughly mauling the PAVN. The Vietnamese, of course, claim that they defeated the PLA and forced the Chinese to retreat; I doubt this. The Chinese invaded Vietnam not to conquer that country but to punish it for invading and occupying Cambodia; to teach the Vietnamese a lesson in humility and remind them that China was the big kid on the block. It has also been theorized that the Chinese civilian leadership wanted to teach the PLA, which was growing increasingly powerful and wielding more and more influence in Chinese domestic affairs, a lesson concerning who really ruled China–who was the boss. In other words, the punitive war with Vietnam was meant by Chinese leaders to punish their own army as well, and thereby weaken its influence in Chinese internal politics. This goal was achieved: after suffering upwards of 65,000 casualties (of which as many as 50 percent were KIA), the PLA was properly chastened, and brought back to heel under the controlling hand of the civilian leadership.

As horrible as the defeat of South Vietnam was, what followed was even worse. For the people of South Vietnam, re-education camps, mass executions, boat people, communist tyranny. For the people of Cambodia – a holocaust in the true sense of that term. Somehting like 1 out of 3 did not survive the madness of Pol Pot and his communist “utopia.”

Every single one of the people who protested against the war has that blood on their hands. And to quote President Nixon:”like Lady Macbeth, it is a permanent stain.”

Never, ever trust a democrat when there is a war to be won.
I lucked out and did my draft experience in Germany, but most of my basic training compatriots went to Nam.

On tv, all you could see were the protestors.
Remember ‘Hanoi Jane’?

I harp on impeachment, and do not trust the current regime to behave in ‘our best interest’ as their basis. Hillary as Huma as a BFF and rumour is that Kerry, ‘I have the hat’, will be the next Sec State.

We are f**ked without even the payment letf on the dresser or a kiss.

April 3 – September 3 1975

Operation New Life was the U.S. military evacuation of about 110,000 Southeast Asian refugees displaced by the Vietnam War out of South Vietnam.

++++++++++++++++++

Who is going to give us an Operation New Life after teh wahn gets throught
with us?

It has been said by people far more expert than I that the Vietnam War may have been a defeat for the U.S., but it utterly exhausted the communists in SE Asia and allowed Thailand, Malyasia, Singapore, and the PI, to survive and thrive, in their own way.

And strategically, in terms of the conflict with the USSR, it did serve purposes. The mere fact we were there gave the Soviets some pause, and the fact that even B-52′s, in mass, at high altitude could penetrate an air defense system more capable than any they had at home scared the crap out of them. Of course, the USAF’s inept initial response to the requirements of EW scared the crap out of us, as well. I had no idea it was that bad; the book War in the Fourth Dimension describes it.

I was Ops Duty Officer at Tinker AFB that night in 1975 when Vietnam went down the tubes. Henry Kissinger flew through and refueled enroute to the West Coast to consult with Ford; I got him coffee.

But we came back from that, despite the conventional wisdom that we had already lost the Cold War. A few of us did not want to give up, and in 1980 we got a real leader.

The Vietnam War was a turning point for this country. Why, because our leaders made a decision that going to war by an act of Congress was no longer necessary. Our leaders would no longer go on record as being for or against war or even winning a war. It became redefined to let’s just go home. So then the public was never ask to support the troops and each person could decide if they supported the war or they didn’t. I have also felt this lead to disgraceful treatment of our troops when they returned home. This why today we get into wars until we get tired and then leave. There is no idea of winning a war, it would be wrong to win. What a shame!

Too many Americans, especially our media, bought the enemy prpoganda which flooded the world. We were largely ignorant of the brutal reality of North Vietnam. Uncle Ho was sold like Che Guevara, evil men with Robin Hood make-overs. That successful KGB disinformation campaign was the root of ours and the RVN defeat–and the Marxist-Leninists won the same way on Nov. 6. It’s The Narrative, Stupid. We are stuck on Stupid.

Interesting points all. I’m not as pessimistic about how S. Vietnam would have evolved had it survived. I think it would have become one of the “Asian Tigers” of the 80′s and 90′s, but that is neither here nor there, is it?

One other factor is that our “defeat” in Indochina emboldened the Communists to expand precipitously, which, in turn, eventually exhausted them. They didn’t have the combined resources to sustain their expansion, especially when they met serious resistance aided and abetted by an “Amiable Dunce” in the White House.

I’m neither American nor Vietnamese, and I was but a wee child at the time, so I come to this issue as disinterested as one can. When I started reading about the final stages of the Vietnam War and found out that the US did not provide any ground troops, I thought: “Well, the country was tired after all the previous fighting and did not want to sacrifice any more of its sons.” Perhaps not admirable or wise, but certainly understandable. When I found out that the US had reneged on its commitments and refused to provide even air support, I was somewhat less understanding. But when I found out that the US refused to even provide the South with necessary financial or materiel aid… well, many years later, I am still shocked. And while God has infinite mercy, I have little doubt that several American Congressmen and “activists” will be spending an eternity in Hell.